Aardvark

About the aardvark

The aardvark is the only living member of its genus, its family, and its entire order, Tubulidentata. Nothing else alive is quite like it. Despite the pig-like snout and the common nickname "African ant bear," it isn't related to pigs, and it isn't related to the anteaters of South America either — the resemblance between the two is a case of convergent evolution, two unrelated animals arriving at similar bodies because they solved the same problem the same way. Its actual relatives are odder than its looks suggest: elephant shrews, tenrecs, and golden moles, all part of the African mammal group called Afrotheria, which also includes elephants, manatees, and hyraxes.

The body is stout, with an arched back sparsely covered in coarse hair, and the back legs are noticeably longer than the front ones. The front feet have four toes rather than five, having lost the thumb somewhere in their evolutionary history, and every toe ends in a broad, flattened nail that sits somewhere between a claw and a hoof — built for digging, not walking. Color is a pale yellowish-grey, though most wild individuals look reddish-brown because they're stained by the soil they burrow through. The skin, not the thin coat, is the aardvark's real armor.

The head is the strangest part. It's elongated, set on a short thick neck, and ends in a mobile, disc-shaped snout that houses the nostrils. The aardvark's sense of smell is built around this snout: it has more turbinate bones in its nose than any other mammal, between nine and eleven of them, and nine separate olfactory bulbs — again more than any other mammal — feeding an unusually well-developed olfactory lobe in the brain. The ears are disproportionately long, 20–25 cm (about 8–10 in), and the eyes, by contrast, are small and simple. A tongue up to 30 cm (12 in) long, thin and coated in sticky saliva from oversized glands that ring the neck, does the actual work of eating. The teeth are just as unusual: there's no enamel and no pulp cavity, just clusters of thin hexagonal tubes of dentine bundled together, worn down and continuously regrown throughout the animal's life. In the wild, aardvarks range across the southern two-thirds of Africa, staying out of swamp forest, where the water table is too high to dig, and out of rocky ground, where digging is simply too hard.

Behavior and diet

An aardvark is nocturnal and solitary, and its whole schedule is built around termites and ants. It emerges from its burrow in late afternoon or just after sunset, pauses at the entrance for about ten minutes to sniff and listen, then bounds out roughly 10 meters (33 ft) before starting to forage in earnest, nose to the ground and ears pointed forward. Over a night it might cover 2 to 5 km (1.2–3.1 mi), though some individuals have been tracked going as far as 30 km (19 mi), zigzagging across a home range of 10 to 30 km (6.2–18.6 mi) and rarely repeating the same route inside of five to eight days — long enough, it seems, to let a termite nest recover before being raided again.

When it finds a promising spot, it digs a V-shaped trench and sniffs it thoroughly before deciding whether to commit. A real mound gets torn open with the front claws, powerful enough to break through hardened termite or ant-hill crust in moments, while the nostrils seal shut against the dust. The tongue then goes to work, and the numbers are startling: an aardvark can take in as many as 50,000 insects in a single night. Termite and ant bites and stings barely register through its tough skin. A single mound rarely provides a full meal on its own, so aardvarks also target moving columns of termites — some 10 to 40 meters (33–131 ft) long — which turn up more often near livestock, where trampled grass and dung draw the insects out. The animal avoids driver ants and red ants entirely. The only non-insect food in its diet is the aardvark cucumber, a fruit that grows underground; the aardvark eats it, later passes the seeds near its burrow, and the loosened, fertile soil there gives the next generation of cucumbers a head start — a small, mutual arrangement between one very strange mammal and one very strange plant.

Aardvarks are mostly quiet, limited to soft grunts while foraging, louder grunts near the burrow entrance, and a bleat when frightened. They're also strong swimmers, capable of handling real currents, and fast diggers — a yard of tunnel in about five minutes when the situation calls for it. Burrows come in three flavors: quick ones dug mid-foraging, resting or refuge burrows, and permanent homes where young are reared.

Range and habitat

Aardvarks occupy sub-Saharan Africa wherever savanna, grassland, woodland, or bushland habitat overlaps with a reliable ant and termite supply. They've been recorded as high as 3,200 meters (10,500 ft) in Ethiopia, and their range runs from there down to South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, with a few notable gaps along the coasts of Namibia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana. They are absent from Madagascar. Two habitat types rule them out almost entirely: swamp forest, where a high water table makes deep burrows impossible, and rocky terrain, where digging simply doesn't work. Daylight hours are spent underground, out of the heat, which is one reason the species is rarely seen outside of dedicated night walks or captivity.

Conservation status

The aardvark is listed as Least Concern (LC), meaning it is not currently considered at risk of extinction across its range. That said, it isn't free of pressure: lions, leopards, hyenas, and pythons all prey on it, and its acute hearing is its main early warning system, backed up by fast digging, a zigzag run, and — if truly cornered — a willingness to flip onto its back and lash out with all four clawed feet, which can do real damage to an attacker. Humans hunt aardvarks for meat in parts of their range as well. Beyond these pressures, no specific conservation programs or population trends for the species are detailed here.